Dude Food Rewrites Rules of Business by Delivering High Satisfaction at Friendly Prices

Dude Food at Satya Niketan, across the road
from Delhi University's South Campus, presents
a model for other aspiring restaurant operators
to follow: quality food, low rental and
uncomplicated yet warm decor.

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

WHERE in Delhi do you get a lamb burger with 300gm of minced lamb in the form of two plump patties, smoked bacon strips and fried eggs included, for the princely sum of Rs 185? Or a Chicago-style, 9-inch deep pan pizza with a crust of meaty bolognaise for the equally royal sum of Rs 275?

Dude Food is re-writing the rules of the restaurant business in Delhi-NCR. Yes, you can now eat quality food without leaving behind an arm and a leg at the establishment serving it. And the owner of the restaurant, Food and Nightlife magazine's founder-editor Sumit Goyal, unabashedly promises you "high fat and high calories", and an experience that'll make you say at the end of it: "Loot liya restaurant ko!"

You'll definitely get that feeling when you have Dude Food's Fried Mars, batter-fried Mars bars inspired by Scottish street food, with ice-cream for Rs 145, or Candied Bacon Ice-Cream for Rs 195, or piping-hot Churros with ice-cream and a generous helping of chocolate sauce for Rs 95. Here you have great-tasting and somewhat unusual food served at unbelievable prices.

This restaurant, the newest big hit in the city, is on a road named after a five-term, 19th-century Mexican president and liberal reformer, Benito Juarez, who fought French occupation and overthrew monarchy in his country to establish a republic that has held together all these years. It's an unusual name for a road separating Delhi University's South Campus and Springdales School, Dhaula Kuan, from the residential colonies of Shanti Niketan, Anand Niketan and Satya Niketan.

Dude Food is at Satya Niketan, the former jhuggi-jhompri, or 'JJ', colony that has gentrified over the years, thanks to rental income provided by students from other states. Its bustling market, dominated by the imposing facade of the Chanakya IAS Academy, studded with little restaurants and takeaways, is a telling tribute of this transformation. This unpretentious neighbourhood on the city's southern fringes has been nurturing the aspirations of Young India; now, it's feeding it!

It is this market that sustains Dude Food, which, between 11 and 5:30, transforms magically into a college dorm with students sitting all over, yelling to each other to be heard above the din, breaking into an impromptu song when a guy starts strumming his guitar. Like Kurt Cobain, the smell of "teen spirit" is all over at Dude Food -- not the cheap deodorant that got Nirvana's front man to write those memorable lines, but the unbridled spirit of Youngistan.

The Dude Pizza memorably recreates a Chicago
deep-pan pizza with generous layers of cheese
and a meaty bolognaise sauce

Once the classes get over, grown-ups drive in from all over to have the restaurant's unusual delicacies, such as Pigs in the Blanket (smoked bacon-wrapped sausages, a favourite of expats who drop in on Sundays; Rs 195), Drunken Chicken (16 wings marinated and finished in Old Monk; Rs 295), classic French fries or fried chicken chunks served with six different kinds of dips and toppings (Rs 125 to Rs 175), and the Garbage Plate consisting of macaroni with tomato and cream sauce, shredded chicken, sausage strips and lamb bolognaise, French fries, fried egg and chicken burger, all for Rs 345. You can have this meal fit for a giant in your night clothes, after giving your week's laundry at the laundromat next door, which charges Rs 20 a kilo.

Goyal is working to a plan, along with his consultants Arun Trikha and Ramindar Bakshi, who have mastered the science of rolling out low-cost, high-return restaurants. Central to Goyal's plan is a high success rate in locating low-rental locations and a minimal investment on decor (but he plans to change the graffiti on his wall, the most striking aspect of Dude Food's look, every three months, so that the restaurant looks new at the start of each quarter). He's paying Rs 1 lakh per month for his 712-sq-foot restaurant, which has 40 covers and a kitchen that services 200 KOTs on average a day.

Unsuprisingly, Goyal has earmarked Rs 40 lakh (capital and operational expenditure included) per restaurant and he's confident that after he opens five, the profits generated by them will "enable us to start a new restaurant every six months". With the APC being Rs 200-250, the restaurant makes Rs 40,000-50,000 a day, which means Goyal can recover his rental payout in two to three days. And he expects to shore up his earnings by Rs 20,000 a day by tapping into the takeaway market.

Goyal says it makes eminent sense to "open a business model and not a restaurant". Without doubt, he's passionate about food -- he got Bakshi to do 135 trial runs before finalising Dude Food's menu of 20-25 pizzas -- but he doesn't let it come in the way of letting his business sense dictate his commercial decisions.

Olive Culinary Academy Students Rock Food & Nightlife Awards Show

By Sourish Bhattacharyya

LAST NIGHT, the first batch of the Olive Culinary Academy (OCA) stunned the packed-to-capacity gathering at Food & Nightlife’s Delhi’s Most Delicious 2013 Awards at Pullman Gurgaon Central Park by producing a three-course meal in 14 minutes and 45 seconds — their allotted time was 15 minutes. Food and travel writer Rupali Dean tasted the smoked gazpacho and could only speak in superlatives, and Food & Nightlife Editor Sumit Goyal just couldn’t stop having the tiramisu.

What we were seeing on the stage — the audience consisted of the doyens of the food and hospitality industry, starting with K.B. Kachru, Anil Bhandari, Alok Shivpuri, Arvind Saraswat, Manjit Gill, Davinder Kumar, Sudhir Sibal, Arun Chopra and Shaju Zachariah, so it was indeed a moment of revelation — was the birth of a new generation of chefs: sassy, savvy, good at their work, and just loving it. Their backgrounds were as diverse as India, which made the group just the kind of melting pot that would produce the country’s first genuinely international cuisine experience. It is the generation that can talk about dining at Eleven Madison Park (the New York Flatiron district restaurant ranked No. 5 in San Pellegrino’s World Best 50 Restaurants in 2013) with the same ease as they can comment on their mother’s rajma-chawal.

The brainchild of Olive Bar & Kitchen’s founder AD Singh and his star chef, Sabyasachi ‘Saby’ Gorai, OCA is a brilliant initiative to nurture batches of young chefs who are, to quote HR jargon, ‘industry ready’ and little powerhouses of talent. After the show, I took AD to one corner and told him he should be prepared to lose his entire first batch to an industry famished for talent. He did seem worried at the thought, but he was excited by the idea of producing a new generation of chefs whom any company in the world (especially his own!) would love to employ. And as was to be expected of him, he was already planning how to retain these talented people by reinventing the role of the chef. What about making them brand ambassadors, for instance?

I could think of Eesha Singh, whose repartee left the normally loquacious ‘sadhak chhaap chef’ and TV presenter Saransh Goila, easily fitting into the role. When she was explaining the dishes being prepared by her fellow students, Eesha combined knowledge, good humour and a radiant smile. Yet, she has the most un-cheflike background — an English Literature graduate from Gargi College, Delhi University, she went to study contemporary dance at the Broadway Dance Center and the Pushing Progress Company, New York, learnt bartending while there and then worked with Ashley Lobo’s Danceworx Academy for three years before becoming a student all over again.

Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai (third from left) and the young faculty of the OCA

The other stories are equally inspiring. Padmaja Kumari Jadeja, whose father is the cook of the family, decided to become a chef after studying English Literature at Indraprastha College for Women and Fashion Marketing at the Pearl Academy of Fashion. Arshhia Chawla, who notched up 85 per cent in Humanities from Apeejay School, Saket, and then studied the Law for a year, chose to be a chef and not a lawyer. Sahil Arora from Faridabad went against the wishes of his elders, gave up his Business Administration studies midway and abandoned the safety net of his family business to become a chef. Mansi Chauhan, a Maths whiz, is pursuing a B.Com. along with her dream of becoming a head chef, in five years, of a successful fine-dining restaurant. Ritu Saigal is already preparing to open her own London restaurant in 2014. Divija Singh from Mayo has a law degree and a Master’s in Social Welfare from Jamia Millia Islamia. How many industry veterans you know come with such qualifications?

In this inspiring young group, Sofia Leyzarova is a name that stands out. Originally from Minsk, Belarus, Sofia grew up in a small town in New Jersey dominated by Italian and Puerto Rican immigrants, studied accounting and psychology at Rutgers, visited Delhi as an exchange students at St Stephen’s College in 2009, and was working for three years in New York City till she decided to join the OCA in the hope of eventually opening a Russian restaurant in Delhi. With so much diversity, I can see the kitchens of tomorrow taking on a completely new look. Each time I meet Saby’s protégés Dhruv Oberoi and Megha Kohli (a product of The Oberoi’s STEP programme, she has joined OCA after a stint at Olive Beach), I can’t stop wondering about the cultural shift that is taking place in our stand-alone restaurants. India’s culinary future is in very safe hands.